Page 3 of Archie

“Did you see this? It says that your sister is a hero. It says her name is Sheppard now. When did she marry, and why wasn’t it in the paper or something? I’m assuming that this is bullshit. She’s about the stupidest person that I’ve ever met.” Doug took the newspaper from Shelly and read the headline. “What did I tell you about jerking shit from me, Douglas? I will hand you things, but you’re not to take them because you want them. It’s considered rude and uncouth.” Doug ignored Shelly for the moment.

He was sick to death of her whining about her own set of rules about shit. Trying to read the paper while ignoring her, she snatched the paper from him, ripping the paper in half and destroying his barely-held temper. Not that he had a good hold on it most of the time, but she was on his last nerve today. A quick, hard slap to her face had her falling backward and ripping the paper in half. Christ, his temper exploded, and he felt it right behind his eyes all the way to his feet. It just took him over the edge.

Picking her up by her hair, he slapped her several times until he had to rein in his anger or kill her. As much as he wanted her dead, he needed her, too. Dropping her to the floor, he picked up the other half of the paper and noticed that the article that he had been reading wasn’t affected by her stupidity. Sitting at the little table that came with the hotel that they’d been renting, he spread out the paper and decided that he was going to have to do something to make it up to Shelly, or she’d not leave him alone. He could almost feel her pestering her hourly until he did lose it again. Christ, didn’t she ever learn?

The paper read like a blow-by-blow accounting of what had happened when the men that he’d hired had gone to collect the money that she’d had. While he knew that she didn’t make all that much, he also knew that the restaurant was insured and that all that they took to pay off his debt would be covered. Why more people didn’t take advantage of this way to make ends meet was beyond him. It wasn’t all that hard. Well, not normally. He had no idea why his sister had stepped in this time. The stupid bitch.

Actually, Douglas knew that his sister was far from stupid. The bitch part was true, but not her being stupid. When they’d been kids together, she would always make great grades when he nearly failed each and every test he took. Mostly, it was because he didn’t try all that hard. And she worked herself to death just to keep herself from getting anything lower than an A. Then, when she’d gotten accepted into college at the age of sixteen, he’d made fun of her relentlessly until she moved away.

Their parents never had much to do with them as children, either. No matter how hard Carrie tried to show them her grade cards or a test she would have aced, they simply ignored her. Him, too, for the most part. The only time they noticed him was when he’d been arrested for something or when he fucked up bad enough that it required them to pay for an attorney. The older he got, the more frequent that happened. Until they passed away.

To this day, he still had no idea what they died of. First, his mom got really sick, ending up in the hospital, and then his dad. A week after Mom passed away, Dad died in his sleep. He’d been so angry with them that he’d not ever been able to forgive them. To leave him all alone after Carrie had left him as well. People were just asses, and he couldn’t stand to be around them much anymore, either.

“You fucking hit me.” Douglas looked at Shelly and noticed something that he’d not before. She had aged a great deal since he’d first met her. Christ he realized, that had been nearly fifteen years ago now. Reaching out to touch the streak of gray that was getting fairly wide on her head, she smacked his hand away. Smacking her back, he yanked on a handful of her hair until he held onto the hank of hair that had been on her head. “What the fuck did you do? Christ, Douglas, that fucking hurt. I think you snatched me about bawld.”

“I was taking out the gray. I don’t like it.” He turned his back to her but listened carefully for her to move. She didn’t care for anyone to turn their back on her any more than he did when someone did it to him. “From now on, you’ll color your hair or find another partner. I won’t be seen with an old hag anymore.”

She jerked him around, and before he could slug her again, she yanked on his own hair. Christ, he saw stars. It hurt that bad. Before he could get back at her, she slapped a handful of his own hair into his face. He looked at it and was shocked to see that it, too, was all silverish gray.

“You might want to take your own advice, dumbass. You have more gray than I do. Not to mention, your beard is mostly white too. How old are you now? Forty? Forty-five? You could almost pass for Santa Claus. You’re even built like the jolly old fuck is.” When she walked away from him, limping and holding her head, he decided to see what the fuck she was talking about. And got up to look in the bathroom mirror.

Douglas wasn’t just surprised but shocked by how much gray was on his face. Even his hair, usually so dark that it looked like it was blue, was mostly gray and silver, too. Deciding, for the first time in about…well, he didn’t know how long it had been, but he decided to shave off his facial hair. It was a good deal harder than he thought it would be.

It was too long for the razor that he had. He didn’t trust Shelly enough to hand her the scissors to have her trim him up so he was sawing at his face with whatever he could find. Which just happened to be a pair of the smallest damned scissors that he’d ever seen. What a woman would use them for was beyond him, but he worked at it for over two hours, thinking about halfway through his chopping job that it might have been better off being all over gray.

Exhausted and his face bleeding from the hair mostly being pulled out rather than cut, he sat down on the commode and laid his head on the sink. He was also out of shape, he realized. Douglas couldn’t remember the last time that he’d been on a walk that didn’t have him resting after a few minutes. He’d been a runner when he’d been younger, loving the way his body responded when he had to make a quick getaway. But no more. He was fat. And gray. Looking in the mirror again, he also realized, too, that he was old. Shelly had been wrong about his age, too. He was nearly thirty-nine years old. He couldn’t remember when that happened to him either.

“That would make Carrie…let me remember.” He usually hated to talk to himself, but today, there wasn’t anyone around that would help him so he tried to work things out. “She’d been fourteen years younger than me, so that would make her twenty-five. That doesn’t seem right.”

But no matter how many times he worked it out in his head, she was twenty-five, and he was almost forty. Christ, where had all the years gone. Not to mention, he thought he was much too young to be having so much in the way of a gray head. Then he remembered his father.

Dad had been nearly all white when he’d celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Also, he’d gotten quite bawld by then, too. Mother had had a lot of streaks in her hair that were colorless but he didn’t know if that was because she’d had it made that way or what. Another thing that he remembered was finding the bald spot as big as his fist on the back of his mother’s head when he’d walked behind her while she sat at the dining room table.

He’d been so shocked by that. Douglas hadn’t said a word about it. Just the thought of her being naked in the back of her head had him picking up the mirror that was there and looking at the back of his own head.

And there it was. His mother’s bad hair. Not only did he have a place back there that had not a root of hair, but it was nearly as big as his entire head, with just a few sprinkles of his hair that seemed to know to float over it. Hiding—not so well how he was aging much worse than his parents had.

He needed to do something. Anything to make it so that he didn’t look older than he was. Coming out of the bathroom, he had a towel wrapped around his head like he’d only just popped out of the shower and went into the bedroom to their suite. Pulling on the first thing that he touched, a dark suit that usually reminded him of a funeral cloak, he was headed out the door when he remembered that he was dead. Or thought to be dead.

“Mother fuck.” Standing there, with his fist wrapped around the handle of the door, he cursed a string of curse words, mostly things that he’d made up, for ten minutes. Then he turned, needing to find something to destroy. All he found was an empty room of even a television. The hotel hadn’t replaced it since he’d knocked it off the wall when he’d first started living there. He’d not been able to leave then, either.

There was no sign of Shelly either, thinking that she might be willing to allow him to—well, willing wouldn’t be what she’d call it, but he would knock her around a bit more. He loved to hurt the bitch because she’d give as good as she got until he used his anger to knock her out. Smiling, he leaned his head against the still-closed door.

There had to be something that he could do. Other than, of course, go out and tell the world that he was indeed alive and that he should be in trouble for all the shit that he’d been up to before and after his supposed death. It was completely unfair that people didn’t have a sense of humor about things. He could have made his comeback, and no one would have batted an eye if they were to have a little fun about it.

~*~

Carrie was home, not her home but that of Archie. It was a fucking huge house with plenty of room for her to choose any room that she wanted. However, it was Archie who told her that the master suite had been redone and that it was ready for her to use.

“I’ve been working on the rooms one at a time. But since you’ve come along, Sunny has sent over some magical beings. I don’t want to freak you out and tell you what they are, and they’re finishing up the other rooms. I’m having all the rooms updated, mostly the kitchen, because it’s really outdated.” She asked him where he was sleeping. “I’ve been staying at Wrangler’s house with him while his home and the others are being built. Again, with magic.”

“What are they? No, don’t tell me. They’re unicorns. No, that wouldn’t be safe for them. Faeries? Yes, it has to be one of those.” He told her that it was faeries, but there were a lot of them. “Of course. I don’t know that I believe you or not but I’m guessing that I’ll have to get used to a lot of things before this is done.”

“Yes. I have, as well. I did want to talk to you about being the leap leader with me. It’s a good job to have. I can take care of the others in the leap that have been neglected for a long time.” She asked him what she’d be doing if he took the job. “Mostly, finding ways to help the people that depend on us. If you see something that needs to be taken care of, you can have it taken care of. Right now I’m thinking that we need to upgrade some of the houses for the elderly. Most of the leap is older. The young people have been leaving because nothing was done to keep them around. I want to take care of that too.”

“That’s a great idea. I like that.” The two of them talked about what needed to be done to bring in more people. After he left, telling her that he had to go and see Johisa about the accounts, she decided to take a nap. She’d been resting as much as she could. It felt nice to just be able to lie on the couch and close her eyes.

Waking up, not knowing what had startled her to wake, Carrie sat up and looked around the room. Sitting across from her, a woman was staring at her. When asking her who she was got an answer that she’d not expected. Nor believed, for that matter.

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